MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) did not originally provide provisions for OAM (Operation, Administration and Maintenance) monitoring of segments in an MPLS network. A type of MPLS for transport networks, referred to as MPLS-TP (MPLS Transport Profile), is now under development by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). MPLS-TP includes OAM features and tools. Certain IETF documents, such as RFC 5860, RFC 5921, and RFC 5960, set forth requirements of OAM in proposed MPLS-TP networks. In such a proposed MPLS-TP network, a device referred to as a NOC (Network Operation Center) is generally employed to configure and to setup network switches. Switches included in the MPLS network store a flow table that instruct the switch as to how incoming packets are to be routed through the MPLS network. A high speed local memory (known as cache memory) in the switch may not be large enough to store flow entries for each flow of packets that are routed by the switch. The entire flow table is therefore stored in a lower speed (larger capacity) memory on the switch and only a subset of flow entries are read from the lower speed memory and stored in the high speed local memory at a given moment in time. The bandwidth of the switch is reduced when the switch is required to read flow entries from lower speed memory and store the flow entries in the high speed local memory before routing a packet.